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What were the accomplishments and failures of the U.S. grassroots movements that responded to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and how do these lessons apply to grassroots movements in general?
RACHEL DAVIS: For those of you who don't know me, I'm Rachel Davis. I'm
a member of the Carnegie New Leaders Program. I'm also a legal adviser to the
special representative of the UN secretary-general on business and human rights.
Now that we have my incredibly long title out of the way, we can focus on Bec.
Bec is the reason we are all here this evening.
I just listened to her respond to a question: What do you do? She said, "Well,
I'm hard to define."
I think that's true, but I'm going to have a go.
Bec is an author and a journalist and, I'm also pleased to say, a friend. She
is the author of Fighting
for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide. She is also
the special correspondent on Sudan with The Washington Post, she is a Pulitzer
Center grantee, and she is a fellow at the New America Foundation.
The book is the result of Bec's multiyear investigation, with over 150 interviews—I
don't know how many declassified documents she has managed to obtain—into
the citizen engagement and advocacy movement that grew up around Darfur. She herself
was very involved, in the early days particularly of that movement. In fact, she
has been called one of the earliest and the most influential Darfur activists.
The book that she has written, I can say from my own experience, is readable,
thoughtful, but also a very humble account. It's told particularly through the
eyes of four other important activists in the movement. Bec's voice comes in at
the end of the book. That's quite unusual, for any author to manage to restrain
herself.
It explores the promises and the risks of the mass citizen engagement and advocacy
approach. That's really what we are here to talk about this evening. The conversation
is framed by the conflict and policy debates over Darfur, but we really want to
focus on the citizen engagement aspect.
With that, I would like to ask Bec the first question: Can you tell us a little
bit about how you actually came to write this book in the first place?
REBECCA HAMILTON: Firstly, thank you for that incredibly gracious introduction,
and to CNL for hosting the conversation.
If I go back to the origins of this book, I would have to start by saying I was
a student activist. I was on the Harvard Law School campus when then-U.S. Secretary
of State Colin
Powell said that what was happening in Darfur was genocide. This was the first
time that the executive branch of any government in the world had made such a
declaration while the violence was ongoing. I was involved in the leadership of
a divestment campaign. Timely this week to note is that Osama
bin Laden was hosted by Sudan in the 1990s. Only after they expelled him did
he go to Afghanistan and, it turns out now, Pakistan.
It wasn't an issue of getting U.S. companies out of Sudan; it was predominantly
Chinese, Malaysian, and Indian oil companies that were in there. The idea of the
divestment campaign was that there were a lot of organizations in the United States—universities
being one of them, but also, eventually, state legislatures—that had invested
in corporations that were doing business in Sudan.
It started on this divestment campaign, but it was taking place in the context
of a broader conversation that was going on, certainly on campuses and more broadly
as well, about the promise of creating a citizen outcry on an issue of genocidal
mass atrocity. Just a couple of years earlier, Samantha
Power had written the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A
Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. She happened to be
my academic supervisor at the time. In the conversation, there was a huge amount
of hope around what creating an outcry from American citizens could accomplish.
So she was involved in the beginnings of that.
But a couple of years in, I was traveling back and forth to Sudan, and following
pretty closely what was happening on the policy level, and I was seeing a real
mismatch between these enormous expectations of this growing citizen movement
and the realities on the ground in Darfur. So the book began just as a very simple,
genuine question of why; what accounted for this mismatch?
When I was looking around for answers to that question, there was just nothing
that I could find that was useful out there. You had voices from inside the advocacy
movement that, to caricature them only slightly, wanted to say that advocacy was
responsible for everything positive that had ever happened in Sudan, and advocates
just needed to do bigger, stronger, and louder. You had voices outside the advocacy
movement who wanted to say that advocates were just idiots who should stop interfering
and go home.
I felt like the truth probably had to lie somewhere in between, but there was
very little in the way of facts in the conversation. It was hard to work out where
that in-between might lie, unless you actually went back and reconstructed piece
by piece what advocates were doing at each point, what they thought they were
accomplishing, and reconstruct the policy process as well. You also could not
assume that just because advocates were saying they wanted something, that was
the reason why policymakers perhaps did do it.
So that was the origins of the book and where it ended up.
RACHEL DAVIS: When we are sitting here this evening and talking about citizen
engagement, what does that mean to you? How would you define that? How does it
differ from traditional human-rights—elite, if you like, policymaking and
advocacy?
REBECCA HAMILTON: For the purposes of this conversation, it's probably
useful to define the people that we are talking about as people who are not getting
a salary from a policy or human-rights organization. We are talking about the
bulk of the people who have a job doing something completely different, who have
family and work commitments, and their advocacy is something that they are squeezing
in in their free time, on a completely voluntary basis. It's important to make
that distinction between that kind of advocacy and your more traditional model,
because it helps explain some of the risks that come up with it.
RACHEL DAVIS: Speaking of risks, and also benefits—maybe we'll take
benefits first—through your analysis in the book and from your personal experience,
what do you think were the benefits of citizen engagement in this case? As you
have said, a lot of people really touted it as being a solution. That was very
much what Samantha Power had been advocating. But how do you see it?
REBECCA HAMILTON: If I can take a little step back and just speak more broadly
before I get into the specifics of the benefits on Darfur, the promise of having
citizens engaged is that we know that with government on its own there is a status
quo there that may not always be in the place that we want it to be.
The promise
of citizen engagement is that you can disrupt that status quo a little, and shift
the attention of the government to places that it wouldn't normally go on a traditional
national-interest calculation. This applies to a lot of human-rights issues. If
government business as usual continues, you may not get the sort of focus that
you want to get on issues that are affecting people in a place like Darfur, a
predominantly Muslim area with no oil and no clear strategic interest.
On that basic metric of shifting the government agenda there are huge benefits
to citizen engagement. You certainly saw that agenda-setting role play out quite
well on Darfur, if you are taking Darfur as the place that you are wanting to
succeed at. I would argue slightly differently if you are looking at the impact
on the whole of Sudan.
But in terms of specifics, things that citizen engagement could do that the elite
model couldn't do: Between 2005 and 2008, they got $2 billion worth of congressional
appropriations for Darfur, which, in context, was second only to Iraq and Afghanistan,
tenfold more than any other country in Africa.
That's not because Darfur, one region of Sudan, had tenfold greater need than, say, the entirety of Congo. But what you find is that it's a very different conversation that happens when you have a mass constituency backing up your claim.
Rather than the elite human-rights
or humanitarian conversation—you need to appropriate this amount of funding
because there is this number of needs and it's the right thing to do—you
get to do that entire spiel plus, "By the way, if you don't appropriate that
funding, we've got voters in your district that can raise hell." That was
a credible threat. By doing very simple things—issuing scorecards, grading
members of Congress on how they were responding to Darfur—they very quickly
were able to get the attention of Congress.
The other area where you saw a huge impact was in media coverage. Typically we
know that the media tends to jump from crisis to crisis. In February, Egypt
was the only thing that we could see. Today, getting anything other than Osama
bin Laden just seems about impossible. Part of the reason is that there will still
be journalists who are pitching, say, the Egypt story in March or in April, but
what they are getting from their editors is, "I'm not sure it's newsworthy
anymore. The public don't seem to still be interested."
Part of the reason the public isn't showing any interest is because they are not
seeing it covered in the media. So you get into this catch-22 situation.
What citizen advocacy was able to do was to completely flip that around by making
sure that every time there was an article even vaguely related to Darfur, they
mobilized citizens to be writing letters to the editor, to get in touch with the
news organizations, saying, "Thank you for covering this. We want to see
more of this. We are reading it." Then if you go back and look at the numbers,
what you see is 50 percent greater print media coverage three years into the crisis
than when the crisis first broke. That's just something that you don't naturally
see.
So it can certainly have huge impacts in certain areas.
RACHEL DAVIS: And through some very straightforward approaches, like the scorecard.
I was really struck by that.
REBECCA HAMILTON: That is something that domestic lobby groups have known
how to do for decades.
RACHEL DAVIS: For decades, yes. So then if we look at risks?
REBECCA HAMILTON: That's where it gets more interesting. We could spell
out the benefits from the theory. The risks only became much clearer when you
actually tried to take the theory and put it into practice.
I highlight two risks. Both are inherent in the model of reaching this crowd that
is essentially volunteers.
Number one is simplification. To state the obvious, if you are going to reach
a nonexpert audience, you have to simplify. There's just no way around it. If
you had asked everybody to read even one book on Sudan before they attended a
rally, you couldn't turn out tens of thousands of people on the National Mall.
So you have to simplify that as the realm of operation that you are in.
If you talk to cognitive psychologists, one of the things that they will say is
that if you are trying to get people to intake new information, it's useful to
hang it on a preexisting schema. That was certainly something that we saw happening
on Darfur. The schema of reference was Rwanda, which, ten years after the Rwanda
genocide, was something that actually a pretty significant amount of the U.S.
public knew something about. They may not have known a whole lot, but enough to
feel a guilt associated with it. By talking about Darfur as a Rwanda in slow motion,
it became a framework through which people could understand a place that they
in fact knew nothing about.
There is an interesting media story about how Rwanda was the framework through
which people started to understand Darfur. It didn't have to be that way. There
was a Darfur story you could have told that was actually about the north and south
of Sudan and the peace agreement, and that coming together at the same time as
you had a rebellion in Darfur. The media never picked up on that story.
The people
at the elite level who were trying to get the message out about Darfur found that
it was just more successful as a news hook to get it in through the tenth anniversary
of the Rwandan genocide. You actually had atrocities happening in Darfur throughout
2003 that were completely missed by everybody. What put it into the limelight
was this news hook that came up around the tenth anniversary of Rwanda.
So simplification is a necessary evil in terms of building a movement. When you
really get into problems is when that simplification, that narrative, also becomes
your basis for proposing solutions. This was a huge problem for the Darfur movement.
Not only did they get into Darfur through Rwanda, but their initial set of policy
solutions was very much, "Let us right the wrongs of Rwanda. Let's do everything
that people said we should have done during Rwanda."
There was a big failure to update, both in the sense that Darfur was not Rwanda
and also that the lessons learned from Rwanda had been written at a very particular
point in world history. They had been written after the end of the Cold War, before
the invasion of Iraq, and during a peak of U.S. hard and soft power, when there
was a huge amount of faith in what America could do if it led the world on these
issues. These lessons just did not fit when you cut-and-pasted them over to Darfur,
in a post-invasion of Iraq scenario.
The other big risk that comes with doing mass movement advocacy is what sometimes
gets called "feeding the beast." There's a need for success. If you
are talking about volunteers, you are talking about people who have worked a full
day in a completely different job, who are running around trying to look after
the kids, doing everything else, and you are expecting them to then spend that
half an hour when they could be getting sleep to be organizing a petition for
your issue. They are not going to keep doing that over time unless they feel that
they are actually making a difference. So you have to show them success.
Now, that's all well and good if you have actual success to show them. What if
you don't? What if, as a result of this confluence of the simplification and bleeding
over into pushing for the wrong solutions, it means that you don't have real success
on the ground to show them?
Then you start getting into really nasty territory
in which you are having to come up with successes, and so you bleed into a sort
of redefinition of what success is. Success is no longer that Darfur is safe enough
for refugees to return to their homes; success is—and this is perhaps an unfair
example—whether we as a movement can send 10,000 emails to the secretary
of state and crash her inbox. Victory! But all the time this is not actually
getting anything done for Darfur.
That's one extreme. There are a whole lot of middle-range options that are components
that go towards building alternate success.
The other thing, in addition to the general need to show success, is the risk
that you are skewing your policy towards what the movement needs to hear to sustain
itself, by which I mean things that can occur on a relatively quick timeline.
In particular—and this is the one that I would highlight as problematic
in the Darfur situation—things that are visible. One of the advocacy leaders
in the book refers to it as, you don't want to lose people to the nothing-I'm-doing-is-making-a-difference
disease, and so you have to have visible success to show them.
That's fine, if it lines up with what your situation actually needs. But what
if your situation actually needs something that is not going to be visible, the
conversations that are taking place quietly behind the scenes? As an advocacy
movement, you end up in a bit of a difficult situation.
So these are the risks that are inherent in the model. I don't think that they
are necessarily impossible to overcome. But there needs to be a whole lot more
consciousness of the fact that those risks exist and a willingness to deal with
them.
RACHEL DAVIS: That cycle that you describe, which was really clear to me when
I was reading the book—this need to show solutions in order to make people
feel rewarded for participating, in order to ensure their continued engagement—can
quite quickly become a vicious one. It requires real leadership to manage that,
and it's needed both within the advocacy movement itself and also on the policy
side.
In that regard, I'm really struck by one of the anecdotes that you tell, which
was from one of the cables that you had released.
REBECCA HAMILTON: Yes. This was the U.S. special envoy to Sudan during the
period, Andrew
Natsios, a guy who knows a lot about Sudan. He is writing to the then-deputy
secretary of state and laying out in black and white that the media and the advocacy
groups are pushing us in a direction that we don't need to go in order to solve
this. However, he adds—and this is the sort of terrifying part of it—it
would be politically dangerous to correct the misperceptions that the advocacy
community has.
What is your job as a policymaker here? You have an advocacy movement that is
increasingly growing in political power and pushing you in one direction. You
as the policymaker are thinking this is actually not the direction that we need
to go to solve the situation. Is it not your responsibility as a policymaker to
follow where the solution lies?
Easy to say that; perhaps harder to do it in practice;
perhaps different depending on what your role within the government is. It is
different if you are a member of Congress than if you are a career civil servant—factoring
in, in addition, the skepticism that we have, particularly in America, which is
often a very healthy skepticism, of government. Who is going to take Andrew Natsios
at his word when he says, "You've actually got this wrong, and I think I
know better"?
Oftentimes, the government will have it wrong on these issues, and there is a
role for pushback. But again, this is where we get into these complex situations,
where you have a divergence between what the advocacy movement thinks and needs,
and what the situation itself thinks and needs.
RACHEL DAVIS: I want to use the moderator's perogative to ask you one more
question and then open it up to everyone else.
You talk in the book and in a number of things that you have written recently
about the fact that we are stuck in a rather state-centric model of citizen engagement,
particularly—and this flows on from Samantha Power's work—an American-centric
model. That is really interesting, given that, as we all know, we are in a time
of global threats, global challenges, global opportunities, however you like to
look at it. Should citizen engagement go global? What would that mean? Would that
actually be a good thing?
One of the quotes in the book was from Gloria
White Hammond, one of the activists that you were focusing on, who said, "What
would a civil rights movement be without African Americans? What would a women's
rights movement be without women?"
Can it go global, and if it does, how do you involve the people who are actually
affected and on whose behalf you are ostensibly advocating?
REBECCA HAMILTON: There's more than one piece to that question, Rachel.
RACHEL DAVIS: Actually, there are about five.
REBECCA HAMILTON: We are in this changing world, and the model that we
have in the Darfur case is out of step with some of the shifting power realities
in the world. A lot of the stuff that I said were benefits of citizen engagement,
were benefits in terms of the fact that they shook up the U.S. domestic political
system. That might be great, but what can the United States alone do? Not very
much.
In fact, having the United States push out in front may in some cases be detrimental.
It often was on Darfur, because you had the Sudanese government being able to
spin this in the Arab media as the United States trying to invade a third Muslim
country. So having citizens push the United States to get out in front is not
always going to be the best approach.
That doesn't mean that getting U.S. domestic politics right and winning that argument
in Washington is not important. But where does that take you to at a policy level?
Maybe you want them pushing for a multilateral approach—this leading-from-behind
concept that we are starting to talk about with Libya.
But what's interesting to me is seeing these sorts of constituencies of conscience
that are starting to grow up. They are growing up around issues like climate change,
human trafficking, mass atrocities—issues that are very global in nature
to solve.
One argument would be that the citizen movement that started here should just
stay at doing what it's good at, which is the noise-making function in the U.S.
domestic political system. That's what it does. If other people want to play a
different role, they can jump in.
Or you can say, if we are going to get engaged, we need to actually think seriously
about what real solutions will involve. If that means going beyond what the United
States can do, then how do we start those conversations?
There are interesting players in the global system right now. When you look at
this BRICs bloc that is emerging—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and now South
Africa—you have three democracies in that. What is happening in the democratic
systems in Brazil, India, and South Africa around some of these issues? What it
would take to move those systems is obviously not going to be what it would take
to move the U.S. Congress, and you wouldn't want to try to make a cut-and-paste
mistake. But are those some of the conversations that could start?
One of 12 chapters in the book that is quite inspiring is when citizens targeted
China and threw out all the conventional wisdom that we have on China, which is,
"Ask any expert. You can't move Beijing's foreign policy by public shaming.
The only way to do it is quietly, gently, behind the scenes."
They threw
that all out to this very un-nuanced campaign called "The Genocide Olympics."
Looking at it from the outside, you would think that this is a total disaster,
but it actually ended up being incredibly effective within the window where they
had leverage, which was right up in the buildup to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
It wasn't that they got Beijing to really care about human rights in Darfur, but
they cared very much about their own image in the buildup to the Olympics, and
you got some shifts in policy over that period.
Even if you are stuck in the United States, are there times when you can go after
other players in the system? More generally, beyond a state model at all, how
are we building connections between different communities and engaging diaspora
more generally, something that the Darfur movement was incredibly late to come
to?
That's just a few of the issues.
QUESTION: I'm Josh Smilovitz, International Crisis Group.
I'm curious how you relate the current Darfur movement, in particular to the Sudan
election earlier in the year and a new state coming about, as well as Libya
and how the responsibility to protect is being implemented.
REBECCA HAMILTON: Can I just hook a little bit of that back to something
that I wanted to say earlier on this simplification challenge? The leaders of
the Darfur movement were aware that there was a simplified story that was out
there and increasingly aware, as you headed into 2008 in particular, that they
were focusing on Darfur to the detriment of the rest of Sudan as a whole.
For anyone who is not a "Sudanophile" in the audience, just as the conflict
in Darfur was erupting, you had the Sudanese government signing a peace agreement
with rebels in the south of the country that brought to an end what had been the
longest-running civil conflict in Africa. One of the negative consequences of
having had this huge spotlight on Darfur was that the implementation of that north-south
peace agreement got a lot less attention than it probably should have. Talking
to people in the State Department, at one point they thought they were spending
probably 70 percent of their time on Darfur, with 30 percent left on the rest
of Sudan, because the movement was so successful and it was attracting attention
to Sudan.
But there were leaders within the movement who were conscious that this was happening
and, in 2008, tried to start a conversation about what else was going on in the
rest of Sudan. It took them two years to get that message out to the base, because
you are talking in sound bites. They are, unfortunately, not reading Crisis Group
policy papers.
That did happen over the course of two years, and we saw by 2010 a consciousness
that there were other things happening in Sudan, including what was supposed to
be this democratic transformative election, which turned out to be nothing of
the sort.
More recently, there has been the refocus on South Sudan, almost to the detriment
of Darfur. This is something that I'm seeing the whole time. We can't seem to
look at Sudan as a whole; we can only spotlight one part of the country at a time,
and whenever we spotlight one part of the country, lots of bad things happen in
the rest of the country. We're seeing that a little bit today with South Sudan.
The people who were involved in the Darfur movement have finally, two years late—arguably,
five years late—caught up with the South Sudan story, but are finding it
really difficult to keep the citizen volunteers engaged on the two stories at
once.
That may be a failure of the narrative that you tell. Why do we keep telling a
narrative just about Darfur or just about the birth of the new nation of South
Sudan? Why not a story that is able to integrate the two? It's there for the taking.
On Libya, there were a lot of questions among Darfur advocates. Having done five
years of massive campaigning and millions and millions of dollars to try to get
something moving on Darfur, suddenly Libya seemed to happen overnight, and there
was a lot of head scratching. We thought, well, maybe we're not needed after all.
That's not necessarily the right answer. Every situation is different. You had
particular factors coming together in Libya. The decision of the Arab League to
say to the UN Security Council, "We want a no-fly zone," was so critical,
because that made it much more difficult for the usual veto-threateners on the
Security Council, in particular China and Russia, whose status-quo position is
always nonintervention. If you had the key regional player saying, "We want
something done," then what leg do you have to stand on? This is maybe a reflection
again of the fact that so much of this is taking place in this shifting global
geopolitical realm, where this old idea that the Darfur movement was founded on—that
if you could just get the United States pushing out in front—is certainly
not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Save
Darfur and the Genocide
Intervention Network [GI-NET], which were two of the key players in this movement,
have now merged. They have yet to rename and redefine themselves. It's going to
be really interesting to see if they can do serious lessons-learned scrutiny and
self-reflection on the experience, including picking up the stuff that did work,
and build that into a permanent constituency against mass atrocities.
There are
differing views as to whether a permanent constituency model is even the right
way to go, whether in fact permanent constituency means that you are at heightened
risk of this need for success, feed-the-beast thing that goes on, and maybe you
would be better just doing your short, sharp campaigns. On the other hand, it's
not easy to generate a volunteer base from scratch. It takes time. If you are
trying to do it from scratch each and every time that a crisis hits, you are always
going to be too late.
So that's going to be interesting to see.
QUESTION: Marc Jacquand. I'm an advisor at the United Nations on
post-conflict responses.
You mentioned this person who has a full-time job, takes care of the kids, and
then gets involved. I was wondering if you could talk about the motivation and
the arguments that drive this person to be engaged—specifically on Darfur—and
what kinds of principles underlie that person's engagement. Depending on the motivation
and the arguments, there are ethical repercussions and there are risks involved.
I don't know if you talk about that in the book, but I would be interested to
get your thoughts on it.
REBECCA HAMILTON: I totally agree with you. On Darfur, again because of
this Rwanda analogy, the message was to be an "upstander"—this
is the key word within the Darfur movement—be an upstander, not a bystander
to genocide, and to make "never again" real. There are a couple of catchphrases
that are core in speaking the language of this movement and a couple of anecdotes
that became really powerful. Going back to the idea of talking to people in sound
bites, you are also talking to people in anecdotes.
The one that became particularly powerful in the formation of the Darfur movement
was something recounted in Problem from Hell, but picked up elsewhere,
that the late senator Paul
Simon had said after Rwanda, which was, "If every member of the Congress
had received 100 letters from people once the crisis was happening, then it would
have turned out differently."
The idea that brought people into a movement was that you could be one of those
people who wrote one of those 100 letters. If that was all it took to save lives,
then what on earth were you doing not writing that letter? It was a sense of tapping
into the "never again" story from the Holocaust onwards—and you
did see a huge Jewish constituency involved on that narrative—a sense of
failure when the stories were told about Rwanda, particularly if you put them
in the light of, "We didn't need to fail. It would have been so easy to stop
it had you just written your letter to your senator."
I'm simplifying, but these are the simplifying stories that are told.
One of the key thematics that is in a story that may allow the building of
a citizen movement, or at least took to build a citizen movement in this case—I
wonder if you could do it without this, and it would be helpful if you could—what
it had was this element of "you are absolutely vital to the success or failure
of this story."
I'm harking back to my psychology roots again. You will know
the story that gets told of Kitty
Genovese, who was a woman who was stabbed, raped, and ultimately murdered
in New York City in the 1960s, whilst, so the story goes, there were all these
people in the apartments who heard her cries and didn't do anything. It gets you
to the bystander effect, which is, if there are lots of people that know that
something is going on, you would think there would be more people to help, but
actually what happens is that everybody thinks everybody else will do it.
This is a story that gets told, perhaps not in those terms, but that's the theme
of citizen organizing: Don't think that everybody else will do this. It is up
to you. If you don't do it, then perhaps nobody else will. It's your voice that
makes a difference.
The other part of it is to really think, not only that your voice makes a difference,
but your voice is the dividing line between life and death for Darfuris. The argument
is not that your involvement is a necessary but not sufficient condition, which
is probably the reality of the matter. The argument hews much closer to, "Your
voice is necessary and sufficient to solve this crisis."
QUESTION: I want to ask a specific and a general question about the United
Nations. The specific question is, where did the United Nations factor into this
specific case? The general question is, what does that tell us about citizen engagement
with the United Nations?
There are arguments that some states use UN and multilateral fora to engage
in what is sometimes called "policy laundering." If you can't get a
policy through your own parliament, you get it through a UN body or an international
body and make them force states to do it, and then you have an excuse to hide
behind. Take, for example, counterterrorism policy.
The Security Council doesn't have an inbox that you can crash, like the secretary
of state, but the secretary-general does. Was that a factor in all of this? Can
you say anything more generally?
REBECCA HAMILTON: Surprisingly little if it's a direct engagement with the
United Nations. This shifted over time, and I'm probably focusing on the early
years of the movement more, because that's where some of the problems got entrenched.
But there was a sense that everything had to go through the United States, and
also a sense that if you got the United States on the right page, wherever you
thought that right page was, they could make it happen at the Security Council.
Again, this was the Rwanda argument. If the United States had just pushed to get
peacekeepers through rather than blocking it, then you would have had peacekeepers.
What you had on Darfur was, in fact, the United States pushing to have peacekeepers,
but other countries blocking it. In fact, the United States was pushing
so hard that it even gave other countries, which perhaps would have blocked it—I'm
sure would have blocked it anyway—a convenient excuse to just stand in opposition
to the United States, because in the global political climate post-Iraq that was
a domestically useful thing for a bunch of countries to do.
But, no, there was not a lot of real understanding of how the negotiations were
happening inside the United Nations. You had a shift in late 2006 to holding demonstrations
outside the United Nations, but not so much in the direct involvement with people
that are doing policy at the United Nations.
It's interesting to talk to Jean-Marie
Guéhenno, who was the head of peacekeeping operations through much
of this period, feeling like the United States was—and perhaps I shouldn't
attribute this solely to him. The United States was getting a lot of heat from
its constituents to do something on Darfur and to get peacekeepers in. It was
easy enough for the United States to grandstand at the Security Council, pushing
for these things. They were doing their own feedback to the domestic constituency,
saying, "See? We went to the United Nations. We tried really hard and nothing
happened."
This was a line that Bush
used, and said, "This failure is on your head, United Nations, if it doesn't
happen."
Well, okay, but how hard are you working your multilateral channels to actually
make it happen, rather than just using it as a sort of bully pulpit, to then feed
back to your citizen movement to say that you are trying to do something?
RACHEL DAVIS: Just a comment on that. It's interesting that when you look
at the solutions that were being pushed for as well, there was this very clear
call for peacekeepers. You spell it out. It was something that people could grasp
hold of. They knew it was a UN role, but they thought of it as a solution because
it should have been the solution in the previous case. It wasn't. That was entirely
divorced from, as all good UN-ophiles know, the conversation when you essentially
ask peacekeepers to be peace enforcers and how difficult that is. As you said,
that really wasn't part of the discussion in the advocacy movement.
REBECCA HAMILTON: There's a lovely—I will misquote it—it's something
along the lines of one of the advocacy leaders saying that it was something of
a revelation that just because you got a UN Security Council resolution passed,
you didn't have peacekeepers on the ground. That was a huge learning curve.
QUESTION: Nicola Reindorp. I'm incredibly grateful for the insights, and my
mind is teeming with things to say. I'm going to try to be disciplined.
I was the head of Oxfam International's office in the period that you are writing
about, and so it resonates, from the perspective, I suppose, of the elite advocates.
What you have done, even today, when I haven't had the chance to read the book,
is to distill, in the way that Samantha Power distilled, arguably, almost better
in the Atlantic
Monthly article, the processes that happen inside the foreign-policymaking
procedure that advocates have to counter if they are going to get governments
to focus on areas that are not inherently strategically valuable, as interest
has historically been cast. You are now capturing processes around the mirror
image of that in a way that is incredibly powerful.
I want to come back by asking three related questions.
One quick observation. One of the challenges on the question of the emergence
of the BRICs is—and like everything, it's a position of rank ignorance on
my part—one of the challenges that you have in watching Brazil, India, and
South Africa at this moment is that they are not yet seeing themselves fully as
global players. They see themselves and they see their strategy within the United
Nations and on global issues through an aggressively bilateral, national perspective.
What I'm interested to see is to what extent their publics are in synch or out
of synch with that. To what extent do you have Brazilians and Indians who are
thinking more globally than their government?
Certainly, from one of the bits of work that I'm involved with by being on the
board of Crisis Action, you have a challenge right now. When we think about, in
Africa, could you get African activists to be caring about Sri Lanka in 2010? It's really hard.
In that same way, you can't become a global superpower until you've actually got
enough space to think about your own immediate interests being met.
So there are interesting things there about the nature of mobilization. Is it
inherently and always going to be local? And how do you mobilize the right constituency
with a local target?
The question I want to ask: You describe so powerfully and cogently the challenge
of simplicity. Is there evolution coming, in your experience, in the citizen engagement
that you see of being able to have your cake and eat it too? To actually use this
beast that has to be fed, that needs simplicity because it's the nature of it,
and actually give it complexity, partiality, mess, and still keep your very tired,
working mother engaged? Do you see that evolution happening?
In the same way, do you see politicians actually evolving in their awareness—the
Natsios argument, the cable, of policymakers thinking we shouldn't always get
pressed? My instincts are that neither of those two things is changing, that your
tired, overworked working mother that's the activist is always going to have things.
You have the same perennial problem with politicians that are still concerned
about the same thing.
So I would be really interested to see if there is any evolution.
The other bit is again, a very egocentric question. Do you see lessons and changing
practice in the interaction between the elite advocates and the citizen engagement?
I was there lobbying the Security Council in April 2004, from the end of 2003,
when we were trying to get the council to focus on Darfur. You watch the policy
lens shift. It's always limited. We were saying to council members in capitals
and in New York, "You have got to understand. Don't do a sequence"—our
argument was, "Don't sequence, where you can sort North-South, then you deal
with Darfur. This is an integral problem."
That was the message that we got. There was this very powerful swell that was
pushing the United States in a particular way. It has ricocheted backwards again.
But what are we learning about how best, or better, to use what citizen engagement
can do to link or interact? What is the nature of that interaction at its most
effective? Is there an evolution there?
REBECCA HAMILTON: First, on the evolution question, I think you're right.
Your tired, overworked mother, for want of a better stereotype, is still not going
to be reading your policy paper on Sudan and how all these different things are
integrated. But I'm seeing that those people will start to fade away. What you
lose in breadth, you start to gain in depth over time.
A couple of groups are interesting. One is the student groups. On Darfur, you
have STAND.
They started off as Students Taking Action Now for Darfur, and now they just call
themselves STAND, because they want to move beyond Darfur, potentially. They are
people who do have time to read and are naturally critical, and so are starting
to engage in this reflective conversation and think about how in their future
efforts—and they are going to be an organization that stays beyond Darfur—they
can generate a more sophisticated narrative about what is going on. So they are
one potential source for hope.
It's hard. I wonder if it would be quite as hard if you hadn't gone with such
a simplified and specific narrative to begin with. Back to your cognitive psych
of framing, whatever is the first issue that brings you in has such a powerful
impact on everything else that you hear. It's very hard to get the update that
doesn't quite jibe with your initial framework of "Darfur is the most and
only important thing that you should be paying attention to in the whole entire
world, and your voice is critical to save it or not." If that's where you
started, you are really facing an uphill battle if you are the person that is
trying to update that narrative. If you had started on a less extreme story, maybe
it wouldn't be quite as difficult.
But you are going to lose the rank-and-file volunteer in the process. Maybe that's
not a bad thing.Maybe in a lot of cases you actually don't need the 10,000, 20,000
to turn out on the Mall, and a core of people that can genuinely say they are
citizens and not employed by these organizations, who have a more sophisticated
understanding of what's going on—maybe they can move mountains.
If you think
about what it took to get such a huge reaction on the congressional level, we
are not talking about the sorts of numbers that the NRA has here. It was relatively
few people, but enough to just tip the balance, because people weren't used to
hearing from citizen constituents on an issue like this.
The interaction between elites and the movement were obviously particularly fraught
on Darfur, given calls for a no-fly zone, and humanitarians getting absolutely,
and rightly, freaked out by that, and then the whole International Criminal Court.
You had a setup of antagonism early on that was hard to shift.
The people who
have stayed with the movement—again, you have had this evolution within the
people who have stayed—are much keener than the people who began the movement to really
get the input of the elite actors, really seeing that they needed it, and very
conscious that there were some really big mistakes. Yes, there has definitely
been an evolution on that score.
Something that I find interesting is the question of where citizen advocates get
their policy prescriptions from. I don't know if anyone from the Crisis Group
wants to talk about this, but there was an initial effort where the Crisis Group
would develop their incredibly great and sophisticated policy recommendations
that they formulate, and you were going to have this new organization called the
Enough
Movement that was going to do the mobilization of the popular side, and this
would be your marriage made in heaven.
That really didn't work out, and so you now have Enough doing their policy formulation
in-house. Maybe that works. Maybe you want to raise the risks that come with that
as a consequence of the feed-the-beast problem. Are you more inclined to put out
policy prescriptions that a citizen movement of volunteers can actually do something
with? Maybe that's what you should be doing. Maybe if you get particularly powerful,
you then skew the conversation.
I don't know if there are any Congo people in the room at the moment. There is
a lot of frustration within that community that feels like the conversation on
Congo is all about conflict minerals, and there is a lot else going on, but it's
being crowded out by that conversation.
I'm not sure what the perfect model on that is.
QUESTION: I'm Caroline Lampen. I work at the American Jewish Committee, which
actually did a big Darfur
Now campaign at the time.
I have a bit more of a general question, following up on what you were just saying
about the relationship between the citizen mass and the human-rights elite. I'm
wondering, at the onset of a movement, what is the interaction between the two?
I know you talked about the evolution over time and maybe targeting a more specific
group within that mass. But I'm curious to know, at the beginning of an advocacy
movement, what their interaction is.
You talked about how we often simplify issues for the mass. I'm wondering, to
what extent is that really the best tool to jumpstart a new advocacy movement
for a human right? For the women's-rights movement in the 1990s, they used the
generic human-rights issue frame to bring that movement about. To what extent
is more than just simplification a good tool to bring about a new movement?
REBECCA HAMILTON: At the very, very beginning, this was a very insular movement.
Again, this goes back to this question of the founding narratives, and how they
saw themselves in the line of people that were going to be upstanders instead
of bystanders to genocide.
The places that they were looking for the kind of intellectual
foundations of it were not the other elite actors out there in different crosscutting
realms that you could have argued should have been feeding into it, but they were
looking back historically: Why is it that we have failed in so many genocides?
So it was an insular and narrow looking-backwards that was hoping to do better
moving forward, rather than broad and looking to other disciplines.
That was at the very start, and that led to the problems that we saw. That's genuinely
different now. There is a pretty substantial awareness that that's not enough,
that it's not enough to know everything about why Armenia
happened, why the Holocaust happened, and that's not going to solve your situation.
There is much more willingness to have a broader conversation, so that's a plus.
Simplification is not where you would ideally want to start a movement. But part
of the reason it gets done—and I don't think Darfur is the only situation
that this has happened for—is that it's really quick. If you feel like you
are responding to a situation where people are dying today, you go for what is
quick and effective. And simplification is. It's very good at that stage. It then
creates a lot of problems later.
If you were, instead, coming at this as, "How do we want to found a movement
that is going to be the citizen conscience on the prevention of mass atrocities
over time?" that's a different starting conversation. I hope that's
one that the newly merged organization of Save Darfur and GI-NET could be having
now.
But the foundations of the Darfur movement were this mad scramble to deal with
something that had already been going on for a year before anyone started paying
attention, because it hadn't been covered in the media.
QUESTION: My name is Chris. I wanted to ask a couple of questions that
might lead to a little bit more detailed discussion of the China aspect of the
campaign and what the successes and failures in meeting the Chinese resistance
might tell us about any future similar situations. Specifically there are two
things.
Number one, when you talk about a tension between the elite advocacy community
and the ground level, I'm curious to what extent the difference between those
two had to do with the nuances that the elite advocacy people understood they
had to use when talking about the Chinese relationship.
As a related question—this isn't particularly a close area of my study—I
seem to remember that part of the Chinese response was that the—I can't remember
if it was PetroChina or CNOOC [China National Offshore Oil Corporation] had been
developing the resources and had been going off on a little bit of their own policy,
but the fact that they were listed here in New York allowed there to be some advocacy
lever to be pushed directly on the company. Part of the story within the Chinese
energy industry is the extent to which they all really do follow the policy that
comes down every five years in a nice package.
I'm just curious what that might tell us about the future.
REBECCA HAMILTON: There's something that you said in the first part of the
question that is an important distinction to draw. The people in the U.S. government
who have a position on what Darfur advocates should do on China are coming at
it from a very different set of objectives. They need an ongoing relationship
with China. That's a very different thing to citizen activists, who just want
to get China to move on a Darfur policy. When building a relationship with China,
it's probably not very helpful to do a mass public shaming Genocide Olympics campaign.
But that's okay. That's a good thing.
What I certainly got from UN Security Council members or their staff who were
working on these resolutions that involved China at the time was a sort of appreciation
for the fact that people outside the system, the citizen advocates, could do the
big, ugly, un-nuanced shame campaign that they could never and wouldn't want to
do. That's a nice division of labor to have.
I don't want to overstate China. Two days after the campaign was launched, they
appointed a special envoy on Darfur, which they hadn't done before. It doesn't
mean a shift in policy; it just means you got their attention. But they did do
a reversal on the issue of peacekeepers. Everybody you speak to who was involved
in that points very specifically to saying, yes, it was the pressure of the Olympics.
But that didn't last after the Olympics window of leverage had passed. It was
then straight back to business as usual. So it wasn't a sustainable change. Maybe
those people in government who are working quietly and slowly are getting sustainable
changes over time.
Divestment—as someone who is involved in the founding of divestment, it was
never going to be the decisive factor financially. Even with the huge investments
that state legislatures had through the pension funds in, say, PetroChina, we
were still not going to tip the financial balance. As much as the divestment advocates
were getting pushback with PetroChina trying to say, "Well, we're separate
from the state," everybody knew that that was not true. That wasn't a big
part of the conversation or a big problem. That was relatively easy to dismiss.
What divestment did do usefully was to highlight that there were other actors
in the system besides the United States. That might have ended up being the greatest
benefit of it.
Divestment is interesting, too, for the fact that you now have Conflict
Risk Network being formed. The people who did learn lessons on Darfur investment
are taking that and looking forward on what businesses can be doing as they start
to get involved in other countries that could also be at risk of mass atrocity.
Back to the point about whether there is any hope, that also actually came from
the initiative of students who were critical and self-reflective about the process
that they had been involved in initially.
RACHEL DAVIS: Just to add on that, because it intersects absolutely with what
I do, I have been working with Conflict Risk Network on the engagements that they
have with various Chinese and Malaysian companies that are currently invested
in Sudan, and an increasing number of other companies that are operating in difficult,
conflict-affected environments.
I wanted to ask you this, because you came into this through the divestment angle—their
approach is now very much about saying: Where are there opportunities for engagement
with these companies? Where can we find levers to use to pressure them? Is it
possible to get to an ideal situation in which multinationals are operating in
those kinds of environments with support, or at least engagement, from key local
stakeholders, and they are actually working as a force for good rather than just,
it's in and you do bad or you're out and you don't contribute?
I would just be interested to see what you think.
REBECCA HAMILTON: That's exactly the sort of lessons-learning. There is
actually very far that you can advance the process on an engagement model with
these companies. You shouldn't start with "let's get them out." That's
a more nuanced story to tell. Yet they have managed to do that. There are a bunch
of citizen divestment activists out there now who get that story.
It's not initially where the story started. Initially it was this simplistic,
"Get them out," and then a kind of, "We saw what happened when
Talisman
was booted out of South Sudan and we didn't like who came in next."
RACHEL DAVIS: And it was Talisman that left, not PetroChina.
REBECCA HAMILTON: Right, exactly.
QUESTION: Tracy Austin.
I have a question about the simplification and what exactly was simplified and
what the complexities were that were difficult to integrate into the activist
movement.
REBECCA HAMILTON: It's hard to say what was not. If I had to boil it down—
RACHEL DAVIS: Simplify it.
REBECCA HAMILTON: There we go. If I had to simplify it, it would be fair to
say that Darfur was not understood as a place that existed within a country called
Sudan. Darfur was a place that fell along the line of your genocide situations,
the most salient at that time being Rwanda because of the tenth anniversary. The
learning that tried to go on and the resources that people were directed to were
about learning about past genocides in other places, not about how what was happening
in Darfur couldn't really be understood without reference to everything else that
was going on in Sudan.
That was the core simplification.
QUESTIONER: [Not at microphone]
REBECCA HAMILTON: No, I don't even think that that's the most important
question in this. We all got very caught up in, is it not genocide? Certainly
there were mass atrocities. I would get beyond the is-it-not-genocide debate and
say, if there are mass atrocity crimes, then there may well be a role for citizens
to play in pushing governments out of their status-quo position on these things.
But I don't think that that was the big problem in the simplification. The big
problem was not understanding Darfur in the context of Sudan.
QUESTION: We are here at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International
Affairs, so I wanted to ask you a question around ethics. A lot of people look
at advocacy movements like the one in Darfur as innately ethical, because you're
an advocate and so you are doing something for the greater good. But as you pointed
out in some of your earlier remarks, there remain certain ethical issues and choices
that advocates must make. The one that stuck out to me was, accountability to
which group? To the group that you are advocating for or to the advocacy group
itself, in terms of lobbying for policies?
Can you expand on how advocates weigh their options in a responsible manner and
how you think they should weigh those options, and also other ethical challenges
that you saw these advocates coming up against?
REBECCA HAMILTON: The key one is this issue of whom you are accountable to.
That feeds into the question of who is in your movement—the Gloria White
Hammond quote, "How is it that we have a Darfur movement, and where are the
Darfuris?"
If you are right in the midst of direct violence and mass atrocity, you are not
expecting that Darfuris are going to be leading the charge, necessarily. But that's
not a situation that we are in for a lot of this. There are very strong Darfuri
leaders, both in Darfur and in the diaspora. If you had them integrated into a
movement, then you run into less of the problem of whom you are accountable to,
which Darfur ran into. So that would help, but there may still be, even with that,
an element of whom you are accountable to, not least of which because Darfuris
have 50 million different views on what the best way to go forward is.
But that's the core one. If you have the luxury of thinking through how to start
a movement, then you should be thinking through these questions of what the beginning
narrative is that we want to open this up on, knowing that that then sets the
direction for a lot of what will come. But I'm not sure that it's fair to say—yes,
in an ideal world, the beginnings of the Darfur movement should have done that,
but it was also this very ad hoc scramble. Now, having learnt this, the question
is, where do you take it forward? I'm really hoping that the ethical dilemmas
in this can start to spur some of those conversations.
RACHEL DAVIS: Thank you very much, Bec. Thank you to all of you for quite
a rich discussion.
You mentioned a couple of times this key word that came up in the movement, "upstander,"
and the importance of being an upstander. One of the quotes on the back of Bec's
book is from none other than Lieutenant-General Roméo
Dallaire, who calls Bec "the model of an upstander," which seems
only appropriate.
Join me in thanking her and thanking CNL.